Goodbye, Sticky Notes: How On-Demand Property Services Are Modernizing CRE Management

As the residential market cools after experiencing unprecedented rent growth and record construction starts, property managers are looking to maintain high occupancy rates, keep residents satisfied and improve operational efficiency.

Though economic trends are out of their control, there may be ways for real estate professionals to ease the burden of managing properties in 2024. 

Adopting modern technology solutions to better serve residents and stay competitive is not only essential in today’s market but will be vital going forward, said Andrea Zubow, vice president of operations at Lessen, a leading commercial and residential property services platform. 

“Property managers often come to us with concerns surrounding the residential experience, specifically residents’ satisfaction with handling maintenance requests,” she said. “When you have something go wrong in your home, it's an urgent matter to you, no matter if you live in a rental or you own your own home. Having a service that’s quick, easy and reliable is so important, and our tech platform does just this.”

Zubow said that often, maintenance issues concerning plumbing, electrical or HVAC require property managers to hire outside resources either because they can’t get to the request quickly enough or they don’t have the staff on hand with the required skills. Insufficient staffing can increase the time it takes to address the issue and cause frustration for residents. She said Lessen's platform allows its clients to address these issues quickly and effectively.

Lessen’s property management platform features a broad network of 30,000 vendors from across more than 100 metro areas. The firm serves clients who manage over 1 million properties, completing 3.5 million work orders every year — that’s nearly 10,000 work orders every day.

“When we source our vendor network, we want to make sure that vendors understand that their commitment to us and our clients is to be high-quality and quick in their responses, and our tech platform is built to solve for that,” she said.

While Lessen is often onboarded on a fully managed basis, where it takes charge of all operational needs, its on-demand services — maintenance solutions that can be scaled up and down as needed — allow building owners and property managers to take advantage of Lessen’s platform and vendor network without the commitment of being fully managed. These on-demand services make it easy to expand available resources by using Lessen's vetted network of vendors and to avoid downtime on repairs, ultimately improving resident satisfaction and operational efficiency.

“You go to a lot of properties and people are working off of whiteboards and sticky notes to take the work orders from the calls that are coming into their office, or they have a desktop application on the computer with what they need to do,” said Josh Swift, president of Lessen’s residential division. “Our platform is mobile, so we put our technology into the field team members’ hands. This increases their productivity and allows them to track what they're doing in real-time.” 

Swift added that Lessen’s on-demand services continue to be refined with the newest artificial intelligence and other technologies. Integrating the technology may be daunting to some, though, as only 21% of property managers use AI. 

“Fortunately, our tech simplifies this barrier to adoption,” he said. “The user interface is very simple, and we design that intentionally and let the complexity sit behind the scenes.”

The complexity, Swift said, is in how to prioritize work orders, identify what the issue is and send the right vendor out to go fix the issue, all within one platform. Lessen has spent the past decade refining this process, he said.

“When we demo in front of our clients, the reaction is always positive,” Zubow said. “Eighty percent of our work orders flow through our system without a human having to touch it, reducing the risk of introducing errors, and that's the beauty of simplifying the complexity through our technology platform.”

Customers who have implemented Lessen’s on-demand services have used it to supplement their workforces and adjust for seasonality — or to find reputable vendors that can solve the issue the first time, Zubow said.

“Our on-demand services provide a lot of flexibility as our customers need it, and the feedback has been great so far,” Zubow said. “We have an average satisfaction rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars. The clients that we have on board with us all concur that we have the highest service ratings that they've seen in the industry.”

One on-demand client used Lessen’s platform to increase the efficiency of its in-house handyman. From processing four or five work orders a day, the company could now handle seven or eight and the team was able to spend more time actually repairing the items than driving across the city to the next job — which was a win-win for everybody involved. 

“We truly do stay front and center with what the customer needs are, which drives customers to our users’ communities and keeps them in their homes longer because of the great experience they now provide as the landlord or property manager,” Swift said.

As the proptech industry continues to evolve quickly, Swift and Zubow said the sector craves app-based software. People no longer want to pick up the phone and call a call center to request a work order, especially since the rest of the world operates on mobile devices, Swift said. 

“Consumers want to engage digitally, and unless you have that ability, you're lagging,” Swift said. “We are investing in the latest technology to make an even better experience on our existing platform, and are looking forward to what the future has in store.”

This article was produced in collaboration between Lessen and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.